As soon as next week, Democrat Al Franken's attorneys will present the case that will prove why his lead in the U.S. Senate race should stand — and even be increased.

Franken will ask the trial court to open and count about 1,600 ballots from areas friendly to him. More than 1,000 of the nearly 1,600 uncounted absentee ballots the Democrat submitted this weekend were from counties that overwhelmingly favored him in last year's election.

For the past month, the court has heard Coleman's case to overturn Franken's lead. The centerpiece of that case has been thousands of uncounted absentee ballots, which disproportionately came from Coleman country. The absentee ballots both parties are asking the court to count haven't been added to the race totals because local elections officials believed they were invalid on Election Day.

Coleman's case could conclude this week.

Since the trial started, Franken attorneys have worked to convince the three judges that the ballots Coleman wants counted aren't valid. That effort continued with a vengeance Tuesday. With state election official Gary Poser on the stand, Franken attorney David Lillehaug got him to say that ballot after ballot from the Coleman list shouldn't be counted.

But Franken isn't just hoping the judges buy that case — his lawyers prepared their own list of politically skewed ballots for the court to consider.

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The three counties from which Franken drew the most ballots are also three of the counties that he won by large margins — Ramsey, Hennepin and St. Louis. Anoka, Dakota and Washington counties all have bigger populations than St. Louis but voters from those Coleman-favoring counties have far fewer ballots on the Democrat's list.

Franken attorney Marc Elias would not say whether the Franken campaign researched the particular voters on that list to check if they voted for Franken or were more likely to do so because of characteristics other than geography.

A court employee brings in boxes of exhibits before the start of testimony Tuesday in the contest of the U.S. Senate race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman. (Associated Press: Jim Mone)

He did say the Franken-friendly list only serves to bring "balance" to the lists of ballots the three-judge court might consider.

Not so, said Coleman spokesman Mark Drake late last week when Franken first released his ballot list.

"Their motto is simple: If it's a vote for Franken, count it. If it's a vote for somebody else, disenfranchise the voter," Drake said.

Elias said there is nothing wrong with either Coleman or Franken bringing ballots most likely to favor their cause to the court for possible counting. It is an adversarial process, he said.

That adversarial nature was on full display in the courtroom Tuesday.

Lillehaug spent nearly the entire day cross-examining Poser about the ballots Coleman had submitted to the court.

On Monday, Coleman's attorneys told the court it should count at least 100 absentee ballots because the ballots' witnesses were registered voters but local elections officials believed they were not.

State law and the court require all absentee ballots to be witnessed by registered voters.

To prove the witnesses were properly registered, the Coleman legal team gave the court printouts of secretary of state registration data.

With Poser on the stand, Lillehaug used those printouts to show that almost 80 of those witnesses might not have been registered at the time they witnessed the ballots.

Lillehaug's work may well have chopped out a huge chunk of the ballots Coleman brought to the court. The fewer ballots Coleman can get the court to consider, the harder it will be for him to reverse Franken's advantage.

In less dramatic fashion, Lillehaug continued working through the day to show that other ballots Coleman wanted counted might not be valid.

Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg told reporters it is unclear by which date ballot witnesses must be registered to vote. He suggested the law could be read to consider a witness properly registered on the date the witness completed his or her own registration form and dropped it in the mail.

Beltrami County Auditor Kay Mack also added some confusion to the date question.

In morning testimony, she said her office considers a ballot properly witnessed if the witness is registered by the time county officials check for registration. Poser earlier had said he believes the witness must be registered at the time she signs an absentee ballot for another voter.

Ginsberg said discounting any ballots for witnesses' registration problems is unfair, since the majority of counties don't even check whether absentee ballot witnesses are registered.

"This cannot be an unparallel universe from the rest of what happened," he said.

The Coleman legal team has also argued that decisions the court has made about which ballots are valid for counting at trial cannot be taken out of context with decisions the canvassing board made for which ballots were valid during the Senate recount. Many of the 933 absentee ballots counted by state officials during the recount fall into categories the judges now say are illegal, Coleman attorneys say.

As a result, some of those ballots "should not be counted," they said in a legal filing.

To explore that notion, Coleman asked the judges to make sure those ballots and their ballot envelopes stay marked. The markings were placed on the ballots in January in case they came up in a trial.

Four weeks ago, the campaigns and the judges agreed those ballots should stay counted and the marks should be removed.

On Tuesday, the judges denied Coleman's request to keep the ballots identified in part because Coleman agreed to have the markings removed.

"The Court presumes the parties were apprised of the risks and benefits associated with entering into this agreement," the court said Tuesday night.

"Voters of Minnesota stand to suffer irreparable harm," the judges wrote, if those ballots are not kept secret.

Although the court denied Coleman's request for an injunction, it may have also given him some hope.

The order said its ruling on the specific question of the 933 ballots shouldn't be taken as a ruling on the rest of Coleman's case or on his claim that all votes must be counted according to the same standard to comply with the Constitution's equal protection clause.

In other words, said Ohio State University election law professor Edward Foley, "equal protection is still alive."